Myntra was set to reach nearly two hundred million annual active users by the close of 2025, half of them Gen Z. Seventy per cent of new sign-ups come from beyond India’s metro cities, and My Stylist — its AI styling tool — is the highest-used feature on the app’s home screen. For the majority of these shoppers, the algorithm is not replacing a human stylist. It is performing a role no human ever filled.

Personal styling in India carries a premium most households cannot absorb, and the profession concentrates in the largest cities. Myntra’s fastest-growing users live in towns those practitioners have never reached.

At launch in 2023, shoppers using the AI assistant were three times more likely to complete a purchase and added products from sixteen per cent more categories. The conversion lift is unsurprising for a customer previously navigating over four million styles with no guidance whatsoever.

In Western markets, AI styling enters a competitive frame: an algorithm against a department-store associate, a subscription box against a friend whose taste you trust. The baseline is human advice. India inverts the premise. The baseline is no advice: a catalogue and a search bar.

Democratisation is a word technology companies use until it stops meaning anything.

Myntra’s chief product and technology officer, Raghu Krishnananda, used exactly that word to describe My Stylist. In this instance he earned it. Styling was confined to geography and income; most of the country fell outside both. Whether the AI gives good advice matters less than the fact that advice now exists at population scale. When the stylist is also the storefront, every recommendation is a shelf placement — and Myntra does not need the algorithm to have taste. It needs the algorithm to have reach.